Month: May 2012

Not only have we seen a shift in polling in places like North Carolina, we now have an institutional shift that will only, with any luck, advance the argument that civil rights are, well, civil rights and that each minority has a reason to support the others in this respect:

The NAACP Constitution affirmatively states our objective to ensure the "political, education, social and economic equality" of all people. Therefore, the NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Further, we strongly affirm the religious freedoms of all people as protected by the First Amendment.

Of 64 on the board only two voted against.

Malcolm Bull (one of my dearest and smartest friends from Oxford days) ponders the moral transformation required to properly grasp the problems created by climate change:

Adam Smith once noted that we are less troubled by the prospect of a hundred million people dying as a result of an earthquake in some distant location than of losing our little finger, but would nevertheless be horrified by the idea we might allow them to die in order to save it. Climate change effectively transforms the former scenario into the latter, and so places unprecedented demands on our moral imagination. Almost every little thing we do contributes to our carbon footprint, which increases greenhouse gases, which could in turn ultimately threaten hundreds of millions of lives in some remote time and place – the uncertainty only adding to the sublime awfulness of our responsibilities… climate change does not tempt us to be less moral than we might otherwise be; it invites us to be more moral than we could ever have imagined.  

(Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty.)

In a picture.

"Preludes" By T. S. Eliot:

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Continued here.

(Image: "Free Fallin," by Jake Longenecker, winner of The Scotch Off the Roll Tape Sculpture Contest, via My Modern Met)

(Hat tip: HuffPo)

Ebert nominates women:

Women value common welfare above singular success. Women are more open to cooperation than competition. Women have evolved to focus more on prudent long-term survival, and less on immediate gains. When women give birth and spend months suckling an infant, they understand better that we all depend on each other. They're programmed to nurture the defenseless, plan for the future, value others for their qualities rather than for their externals.

Jill Filipovic sighs:

Most people have the capacity to be wonderful, non-violent, nurturing and loving. Most people also have the capacity to be competitive, driven, aggressive and ruthless. Most people are capable of great kindness; most people are capable of being total assholes. The degree to which any of us displays any of these traits depends largely on circumstance and partly on individual personality and temperment. Those things are certainly influenced by gender, but our gender does not in fact hard-wire us to be nice or awful.

A reader doesn't think so:

I suspect your obit for Occupy is a bit premature.  To compare Occupy's immediate impact to the Tea Party somewhat ignores very fundamental differences in these organizations.  The Tea Party, for all its outsider grassroots credentials, was largely organized by established Washington power brokers.  These were people with a specific agenda and were looking to operate within the traditional political system.  The Tea Party was made up of a demographic that was older and more a part of establishment politics to begin with. Occupy, on the other hand, is a far more genuinely grass roots organization made up of a much younger crowd. 

The Occupiers are far more innately anti-establishment than the Tea Partiers and therefore they haven't been integrated into the party machinery like the Tea Party has been.  This was always going to put a limit on their short-term effectiveness.  But in the long run, you've got an entire generation that is having their view of politics shaped by this movement.  An entire generation thinking about our economy in terms of the 99% versus the 1%.  Over time these people will become more engaged in the traditional political process and it will reshape the landscape far more fundamentally than the Tea Party did.

Marc Lizoain is more circumspect:

Occupy was a moral force. Its slogan "We are the 99%" and its symbolic attack on the whole world financial system had a huge impact on the imaginations of millions of people around the world and greatly unnerved the nation’s most powerful people. However, there is no question that in 2011, in New York City, it did not yet possess tangible political, economic, or physical force.

He also points out:

According to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the percentage of Americans who say they are supporters of Occupy Wall Street has fallen since November from 29% to 16%. A Siena Research Institute survey shows that the number of New Yorkers with a favorable view of Occupy has fallen from 58% to 49% over approximately the same period.

(Photo: A Chicago Occupy Wall Street protester covers himself with an American flag as he lies on the ground following a march through the streets of downtown Chicago on May 18, 2012, on the eve of the NATO summit. After a decade in Afghanistan, NATO leaders are gathering for a key summit on May 20, 2012, hoping for a show of unity in the final two years of combat – even though allies are eager to bring troops home. By Saul Loeb/AFP/GettyImages)

Marilynne Robinson reflects.

John Horgan catalogues some of science's worst "missteps": 

In a paper published in 1972 in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, [Robert] Heath described an experiment on a 24-year-old male homosexual with a history of epilepsy, depression, and drug abuse. The man, whom Heath called patient B-19, was facing charges for marijuana possession when he agreed to serve as Heath’s subject. Heath drilled a hole in B-19?s skull and inserted an electrode in the septal region of his brain, which is associated with pleasure. B-19 could stimulate himself by pressing a button on a hand-help device. B-19, who according to Heath had never had heterosexual intercourse and found it "repugnant," stimulated himself to the point of orgasm while watching a heterosexual porn film and, later, having intercourse with a 21-year-old female prostitute supplied by Heath. The patient "achieved successful penetration, which culminated in a highly satisfactory orgiastic response, despite the milieu and the encumbrances of the lead wires to the electrodes," Heath wrote. One wonders what an institutional review board would say about Heath’s research today.

A beautiful skateboard slow-mo: